A swindler who cleaned out the apartment of a Moscow gay man who had wanted to celebrate Old New Year in the company of a young man was apprehended hot on the trail by officers of the 9th Division of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department on the Arbat. The con man slipped a powerful substance into his acquaintance’s vodka, and when

the man “passed out,” he carried valuables out of the home. As the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department told Moskovsky Komsomolets, the 40-year-old director of Rostorginvest CJSC often visited a square in Kitay-Gorod to meet young male prostitutes.

On January 13, the man decided to celebrate Old New Year in the company of a young man. The businessman went to the square and there met a 29-year-old native of Armenia living in the Orenburg Region.

This citizen had come to Moscow a year earlier; friends had told him that one could earn good money here by offering oneself to devotees of nontraditional sex. Since then he had gone “hunting” in the square. As a rule, in order to strike up a conversation with a potential client, he introduced himself as a “specialist of broad profile,” offering, among other things, plumbing-repair services.

The businessman invited the Caucasian man to his apartment on 26 Baku Commissars Street and set the table for him. The new acquaintances drank vodka, and then the guest suggested that the host go to the bathroom. The lover dissolved a tablet of the powerful substance azitilin in his glass. When the businessman returned to the table, he drank the vodka, and then his consciousness shut down.

Having neutralized the businessman, the Caucasian man packed his own things into a bag and changed into the homeowner’s expensive clothes. Then he took a Samsung VCR and a cordless phone, and also grabbed a Nokia mobile phone after first removing its SIM card.

In addition, the swindler removed from the wall a small painting by the contemporary artist Oleg Trofimov (the artist graduated from the Stroganov Institute and at one time painted murals in St. Andrew’s Monastery), which the businessman had bought at VDNKh. The canvas depicted a nude woman. The gangster then left the residence and went off to look for buyers for his loot.

Some time later the businessman’s parents arrived at the apartment and found their son in a rather helpless condition; on January 14, police officers detained the young man on the Arbat, where he was trying to sell the stolen goods.